Jacques Barzun: Vast Erudition

[RonPrice]

VAST ERUDITION

Jacques Barzun has been writing books since the time my mother and father first met in or about 1937, the year he became a Professor at Columbia University. The year I joined the Baha’i Faith Barzun published his The House of Intellect, that was in 1959. Barzun had been embarked for many years on a sustained exploration of the influences that distract people from clear, direct and critical thinking. His whole life has been spent exploring this theme. The first blow in his long campaign was the book Education in America, first published in 1944, the year of my birth. This book a tour de force of the major deficiencies and impediments in the education system from school to college, ranging from the notion that learning just has to be fun, to the Teacher Training Schools in the colleges and the soul-destroying drudgery of the PhD ordeal. In The House of Intellect he identified intellectuals themselves as the major agents in the erosion of the life of the mind, the trashing of the house of intellect, along with the influence of distorted views of Science, and the unhelpful contribution of Business inspired by misplaced Philanthropy.-Ron Price with thanks to Rafe Champion, "Style in the House of Intellect," The Rathouse.com, 2002.


I was just too busy, Jacques,
getting through high school
and then university and then
surviving all those years as a
teacher: why Jacques it kept
me on overhead-full until 1999.

And you were still churning out
books I had never read or even
heard of—until just the other day.
I won’t get through all thirty, but
I’ll get a handle on your ideas
reflecting as they do the view
that our age is in a dark heart
of a world of transition with its
slough of despond, its spiritual
paralysis, its potential for joy
and its hope for truths that
are perennial but not archaic,
all coated with an immense,
a vast, erudition.

Ron Price
July 24th 2006